Engaging Ideas - 6/23/2017

Every week we curate stories and reports on complex issues. This week: How Americans define themselves as middle-class by lifestyle and not just income. How Mayor de Blasio preps for engaging with New Yorkers at town halls. Texas leads the way in educating students from urban low-income families. Getting to the end zone, UNC universities program focuses on helping stopped-out students. The U.S. still has a longstanding trend of having lower life expectancy, why?

Democracy

In
Search of the American Center (The New York Times)
Ross Doubthat writes: I am not usually fond of the “this one chart explains
everything” genre of political analysis, but every rule has exceptions, and I’m
going to make one for a chart that accompanies a new survey on the 2016
election. It helps explain why Donald Trump won the presidency and why his
administration is such a policy train wreck, why Democrats keep losing even
though the country seems to be getting more liberal, and why populist surges
are likely to be with us for a while — a trifecta of rather important
explanations.

How the
Mayor Preps for a Town Hall Meeting (WNYC News)
At any given town hall—he held his 27th on Wednesday—Mayor de Blasio can face
questions about everything from hyperlocal traffic patterns to why it's worth
living in this expensive city at all. WNYC recently sat in as the mayor and his
team prepped for a town hall in Queens, then went to the event to see if all
that prep helped him actually connect with his constituents.

Quality matters in early
childhood education (Heckman Equation)Complementing their recent cost-benefit analysis
of the ABC/CARE Program, Professor Heckman and his team look at the differences
in outcomes based on gender in their paper, Gender Differences in the Benefits
of an Influential Early Childhood Program. As with most early childhood
studies, they find that quality early childhood education benefits low-income
children, but they also find significant differences by gender. Although all
children benefit most from high quality care, girls show some improvement in
lower quality care and boys are actually harmed by it.

Higher Education & Workforce Development

Hitting
Re-start for Stopped-out Students (Inside Higher Ed)
Part of a University of North Carolina system, the Part-Way Home program was
launched in September 2016 after discussions about how to better serve
stopped-out students. UNC universities created individual programs dedicated to
re-enroll those students, with names often drawing on football imagery: the End
Zone program at North Carolina Central University, Finish Line at Western
Carolina University -- and the list goes on.

Students'
Rising Expectations Pose Challenge to Online Programs
(The Chronicle of Higher Education)
The report on the survey, "Online College Students: Comprehensive Data on
Demands and Preferences," found that nearly half of students met in
classes of eight weeks’ duration or less. Under Education Department
guidelines, which are designed to ensure students don’t collect more in federal
aid than they are entitled to, that should translate into students’ spending at
least 16 hours a week per course in class and on their out-of-class
assignments.

Colleges
Face More Pressure on Student Outcomes, but Success Isn’t Always Easy to Measure
(The Chronicle of Higher Education)
The successes of students like Ms. Harvin haven't translated into plaudits for
Williamsburg Tech, which has a graduation rate of just 9 percent on the
Education Department’s College Scorecard. Dual-enrollment students haven’t been
counted toward the federal calculation of the college’s graduation rate. On
average, just 6 percent of the nearly 700 students who enroll at the college
are the "first-time, full-time" students who have been counted under
federal graduation rates.

Community
health centers should make the move toward value-based care
(Fierce Healthcare)
“A switch to value-based care among CHCs could promote higher-quality, more
efficient and more patient-centric care,” the authors wrote. “Because of the
vulnerability of patients served by CHCs, however, this shift must be done
thoughtfully, while honoring the original intention of the prospective payment
system—to protect safety net clinics from the volatility of Medicaid rates.”